Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the invention are generally directed to characterizing network relationships.
Description of the Related Art
A “social network” generally refers to a collection of personal or professional relationships between individuals. Social networks often have a critical role to play in managing organizations, enabling problem-solving, decision-making, collaboration, and information sharing, as well as facilitating trade and commerce. A social network graph provides a graph illustrating relationships between individuals. Social network graphs frequently represent individuals using nodes and links between nodes to indicate a relationship between any two individuals (or other organizational entity, e.g., a corporation).
Existing technologies for generating social network graphs typically rely on “degrees of separation” to build and display a social network. For example, users specify a number of degrees-of-relationship to view for a primary entity and then view related entities to the specified degree of depth. Often, relationships between entities (typically a person) are based on self-identification. That is, individuals specify who they know (or they are friends with). This allows a graph to be generated that presents not just friends (first-degree relationships), but friends-of-friends (second-degree relationships), and friends-of-friends-of-friends (third-degree relationships), etc. When users self-identify relationships in this manner they typically, even if only implicitly, specify first-degree relationships of some level of importance. That is, although an individual may have passing first-degree contacts with many people, only individuals with whom they have a relationship of some minimum strength or quality are self-identified as being part of their social network.
Another approach for generating a social network graph is to rely on records from one or more datasets. For example, a large number of email messages could be analyzed to create an entity for each unique “from” or “to” address and a link between two entities based on the same. Of course, relationships between individuals could be identified using a wide variety of data records. In this example, each relationship in a social network graph may be based on email messages addressed from one individual to another. However, if one person has multiple email addresses, then a social network graph generated in this manner may end up having multiple entities (nodes) representing the same individual. For example, a separate entity in a social network graph may be created to represent the same person's work email address and home email address. If additional datasets are used, this may result in additional entities in the social network graph that, ultimately, refer to a single individual.